ROMA IN HOLOCAUST SINTO AND ROMA
Sinti & Roma: Victims of the Nazi Era
For centuries Europeans regarded Gypsies as social outcasts a people of
foreign appearance, language, and customs. In modern Germany,
persecution of the Sinti and Roma preceded the Nazi regime. Even though
Gypsies enjoyed full and equal rights of citizenship under Article 109
of the Weimar Constitution, they were subject to special, discriminatory
laws. A Bavarian law of July 16, 1926, outlined measures for
"Combatting Gypsies, Vagabonds, and the Work Shy" and required the
systematic registration of all Sinti and Roma. The law prohibited
Gypsies from "roam[ing] about or camp[ing] in bands," and those
"[Gypsies] unable to prove regular employment" risked being sent to
forced labor for up to two years. This law became the
national norm in 1929. When Hitler took power in 1933, anti-Gypsy laws
remained in effect. Soon the regime introduced other laws affecting
Germany's Sinti and Roma, as the Nazis immediately began to implement
their vision of a new Germany one that placed "Aryans" at the top of the
hierarchy of races and ranked Jews, Gypsies, and blacks as racial
inferiors. Under the July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Offspring with
Hereditary Defects," physicians sterilized against their will an
unknown number of Gypsies, part-Gypsies, and Gypsies in mixed marriages.
Similarly, under the "Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals" of
November 1933, the police arrested many Gypsies along with others the
Nazis viewed as "asocials" - prostitutes, beggars, chronic alcoholics,
and homeless vagrants - and imprisoned them in concentration camps.
